Friday, November 16, 9:30 AM–4:30 PM

The Religion and Media Workshop, one of the most popular sessions at the AAR annually, was a resounding success in 2011, inspiring new conversations and collaborations in the study of religion and media. The 2012 Religion and Media Workshop will build on this success, but with a new format: the master class. The seminar-style workshop will survey the emerging critical scholarship on emotion, sentiment, and “affect” and try to think through the value of this rich body of scholarly work for religious studies. It is our hope that the day’s conversation will lay the groundwork for new approaches to the study of religion, media, and culture by calling greater attention to the affective and emotional dimensions of public religion.

The AAR and SBL returns to Chicago in 2012 at the end of an election cycle in which emotion and enthusiasm will likely be deciding factors. How are such political emotions produced? How do structures of political emotion accommodate, enable, or disavow religion? This year’s Religion and Media Workshop will explore how religious and media technologies generate, regulate, and structure feeling. Drawing on a long history of thought on religion, emotion, and enthusiasm, as well as recent developments in affect theory, workshop participants will combine their multidisciplinary perspectives to map public, religious, and political affect in the United States and beyond.

This year, we are working with an entirely new format that will make use of our daylong structure and the rich potential of a sustained conversation with diverse scholars and media-makers. Rather than traditional paper sessions, the day will be structured as a master class in affect for religious studies, with a particular focus on religion, media, and politics in America. Three to five readings will be circulated to participants before the event. In the morning, scholars in the field will lead three successive seminars that consider the interrelations of affect, religion, and political movements. Lunch will feature small group conversation on these themes. After lunch, media practitioners and political campaign strategists will lead a hands-on practicum to address concrete applications of emotion and affect in media and social movements. A moderated afternoon roundtable discussion will build on the critical vocabularies developed during the day.

Because of the nature of this year’s workshop, it is essential that all participants commit to doing the readings ahead of time and prepare to participate in seminar-style conversation.

This master class will be led by:

Jason Bivins, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University

Matthew Day, Department of Religion, Florida State University

Christian Lundberg, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Ann Pellegrini, Departments of Performance Studies and Religious Studies, New York University

Robert Pérez, Fenton

Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Department of Religion and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Wesleyan University

Amy Simon, Goodwin Simon Strategic Research

Bonnie Turner, Writer and Producer

The cost for the workshop is $60, which includes lunch and the entire day of sessions. Registration is limited to the first 75 participants. To sign up for the workshop, log back into the online Annual Meeting registration system and add the workshop or fax in this form to +1-404-727-7959.

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